


Lay Down Your Head

by rosegardeninwinter



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-04
Updated: 2019-02-04
Packaged: 2019-10-22 11:00:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17661404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosegardeninwinter/pseuds/rosegardeninwinter
Summary: "You hear that? That's Rue's song. She's whistling the day's end. It's time to go in."





	Lay Down Your Head

Haymitch is the first to go. Not for many years—he watches the children who call him grandpa get too big for their shoes every other month and he shambles around as long as he is able, stubbornly insisting on being well—but the day does arrive.  


The girl who is not his daughter (but is as good as) stops by his house one cold day to bring him soup and feed the geese in the yard. The boy who is not his son (but is as good as) finds her hours later, crying on the porch — and they’re tears of relief as well as grief, because maybe she senses what the old man sees.  


A familiar town, no longer grimy with coal dust, no longer surrounded by barbed wire fences. The house he was born in, weeds growing wild around the porch, with cooking smoke pouring out the chimney and laundry on the line. He can hear voices and laughter.  


Ma. His brother. His girl.  


He takes a step forward  


— and the door flies open.

* * *

She knows it’s time. She can feel it in every bone and synapse.  


It’s been such a short while, but for Annie, it’s much too long. Her son understands, and when the doctors propose more treatment, he turns them away. His mother wants this.  


They walk the shoreline together one misty morning. She lies in bed and takes the last of her medicine.  


She grips her son’s hand like it’s an anchor until the breeze tugs her free of the floor and out to sea.

* * *

The scene is a painful sort of familiar, but he smiles weakly when he sees the eyes that are the same color as his own. “Catnip.”  


“Gale.” She leans her forehead against his fevered temple.  


“It’s okay,” he says, stroking her graying hair. “It’s okay. I’ll tell them all hello from you, how about?”  


“Thank you,” she says.  


“You take good care of yourself. Tell that baker that if he doesn’t keep treating you right, I’m coming back to haunt him.”  


“I’ll do that.”  


“I’m going to miss you, Catnip,” he says. “You were my best friend.”  


When he falls asleep, she stays close by, holding his hand. When he wakes up, she’s still there, staring at the rain through his window.  


“Thought you’d be gone by now.”  


“I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to stay right here and cause all kinds of trouble.”  


“Me too,” he says tiredly.  


He passes an hour later.  


The first person he sees when he opens his eyes in a forest glade is the least expected and the most welcome. “Gale!”  


He catches her up in his arms like he used to catch his own sister and he spins her around and around for who knows how long, the air full of her laughter and her blonde braids—  


“I’m sorry. I promised I’d protect you and I didn’t. I’m so sorry,” he says.  


“I forgive you,” she says, squeezing tight, “I forgive you.”  


—and her forgiveness.  


He sets her back down again and she skips away a pace. “C’mon!” He runs after her and she leads him through the sunny woods, alive with singing birds. “Everyone wants to see you,” she chirps. “Your father and your mother and Madge and everyone!”  


Which reminds him. “Prim,” he tells her, “Katniss says hello.”

* * *

Johanna doesn’t go down without a fight. She was never that way. When her lungs finally do fail her, she asks to be carried outside to see the trees one last time.

* * *

The old baker lies peacefully in his bed. His hair is white. His hands and face are etched with wrinkles and old scars.  


His blue eyes are unchanged.  


His wife lies beside him. Her fingers stroke over his palm. He doesn’t remember much now, the torture of almost eighty years ago having caught up to his mind again, but he remembers her. He always remembers her.  


“I never thought I’d go like this,” he says. “Though, granted, at one time I didn’t think I’d make it past sixteen. It’s been a good life.”  


“Yes, it has been.”  


It’s been a nightmare of a life too. But somewhere along the long road, the memories of war and pain have been eclipsed by those of planting primroses, swimming in a hidden lake, the birth of their children, their grandchildren.  


An involuntary shudder runs through him and his grasp on her hand tightens. She gives a cry.  


“It’s only for a little while,” he manages. “You’ll be with me soon.”  


She wraps her arms around him. “I know,” she gets out, barely.  


His breathing is rasped and weary.  


“Katniss,” he says suddenly and there’s a strange quality to his voice that wasn’t there a moment ago—both panic and calm—and she grips him as tightly as her frail arms are able.  


“I’m here. I’m here.”  


“You love me.” He’s taken up his old game again in these dwindling days. But he knows the answer to this question. “Real or not real?”  


“Real,” she says.  


“Real,” he echoes. His eyes flutter. Blink tenderly at her once, twice, three times. Close.  


Neither of them breathes.  


Then she exhales, very, very quietly into the darkness.  


“Stay with me.”  


The silence that follows is deafening.

* * *

Decades late, she wishes she could apologize to her mother. Tell her she gets it at last.  


At night, she finds herself standing at the doorstep, waiting for her husband to come down the dirt road from work. Sometimes she waits for hours, goes in to call the bakery, then remembers. She makes two cups of tea in the morning, one with sugar, one without. The one without develops mold. She straightens his paints and brushes and wipes away the dust that collects there. She hobbles into bed at night and she is so tiny and the bed is so big and piles of blankets cannot keep her warm.  


It’s less than a month after his death when she gets sick.  


Her children (who have little grandchildren of their own by this time) come to tend to her. One day, when the first birds of springtime return, she asks her daughter to bring her the family book. Propped against her pillows she watches the light in her son’s eyelashes as he writes down her every word.  


Memories take life on the brittle page, memories her children will never forget. The way their father’s eyes would light up whenever he heard their mother’s shoes on the doorstep, the special voice she reserved just for him.  


Her bony fingers press a wildflower into the pages.  


“Finish it,” she tells them. “Finish it for me.”  


(They promise they will. And they do.)  


Her eyes drift to the window. “You hear that?” she murmurs. “That’s Rue’s song. She’s whistling the day’s end. It’s time to go in.” And her heart thumps gently to a stop.  


Her actual funeral is very small, but half of Panem sends gifts and flowers to the little group of people who gather around the gravestone in the woods to say goodbye to “mama,” or “grandma,” or “great grandma Katniss,” and raise a three fingered salute.

* * *

Deep in the meadow, under the willow, the sun is rising, flushing the clouds violet — and Jack Everdeen is singing. His wife leans against him. Their golden daughter twirls among the flowers.  


Johanna rests on a low hanging bough. Gale absently twirls a leaf, lying on his back, staring at the sky.  


Finnick is braiding Annie’s hair as she lies with her head in his lap, humming along to the miner’s tune.  


Haymitch, years of anger smoothed from his brow, stands with his back against the willow’s trunk, watching a couple silhouetted against the sunrise, young and whole again.  


Dancing.  


Dancing a light town step, the hem of her dress whirling around her knees, the burnished red of the dawn catching his hair and the frame of their figures.  


So that for a few flickering heartbeats, it seems as though they are on fire.


End file.
